I'm a search and rescue diver and the ocean is scary

The worst part about my job is the drownings. Usually when someone goes missing on the water, we find their bodies within 72 hours or we don't find them at all. *That's because the waters we usually patrol are shallower, and a human corpse will typically float to the surface in 3-5 days,* my morbid voice whispered, and I shushed that voice, forcing myself to go on with the story. <br><br>So, a drownings are usually pretty standard. A person will be on a boat doing a fishing trip or something, and will lean too far over the edge, and then they'll go missing. Or they'll be doing water sports and crash badly. There's no mystery with those. We'll get the recent description, find the place where they were last seen, and then search the water. If they're still in the wrecked boat or car, it's an easy recovery. If the collision was bad enough to wreck the vehicle, we'll usually find the victim in shreds nearby. If we can't find them, we keep looking until we find a body. *Unless they go missing in deep water,* my morbid voice chimed in again. I tried to push it away, but remembered what working deep water meant and had to stop. <br><br>Working deep water was different. We patrolled the waters connecting the gulf to the ocean. Those waters are deep and the current can sometimes be tricky, but few people took those routes because it was so hard. If someone went missing out there, we usually never found them, and if we did, it would be because we got a call of a body washing up on a beach. By the time we found the body, it would be so decomposed we couldn't identify them. It was a long process, but finding the missing person was usually the end of a missing persons case for us. *Because the sea always gave up her secrets,* chimed that damn voice.<br><br>So, I'd worked a lot of drownings, but nothing could have prepared me for what happened. <br><br>It started as a normal drowning case. A person went missing, and we searched the waters with no luck, and then we gave up. I'd completely forgotten about it until an extremely decomposed body washed up on a beach about 100 miles away. The police called us to identify the body.<br><br>I got there and it was obvous the remains were the person who'd gone missing. They had a rock solid alibi for where they were and the body matched their description. I was about to radio in that the remains were the missing person, when I stumbled upon something strange. The body had been in the water for a while, and the skin was decomposing. I saw something sticking out of the decomposing skin, and pulled it out. It was a fishing hook. <br><br>I radioed in that I found something strange on the body, and that I needed some help. When we got the body back to the station, we were able to do a better examination. We found fishing line inside the corpse, with hooks at either end. <br><br>We were all baffled, but the only thing we could think of was that the body had somehow gotten caught in fishing line and the hooks had pierced the decomposing body. It didn't make sense because we knew where the missing person had gone missing, and it was nowhere near any known fishing spots. <br><br>But the worst part came when we discovered the body was caught in a knot. *A bowline knot. Just like the kind you'd use to tie a rope to a rock to serve as a anchor.*